What Is the Happiest Personality? (It Actually Might Be Yours)

Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your Vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple-conducted study of heart rate accuracy August 2026. Visit apple.com slash applewatchseries12. I want to talk today about personality and how personality affects happiness. Specifically, I want to talk about one aspect of personality, extroversion. How extroversion versus introversion affects happiness. Extroverts are not a lot happier. Extroverts are a little happier on average. Not only do they have sort of more intense periods of well-being, but their general well-being is punctuated by frequent moments of joy. And so I want to talk about why that is. How can introverts, as introverts, be happier people? And then, what can extroverts learn from introverts? Because it turns out that there are some very important things that they can learn that can lead to a lot greater happiness for everybody. Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness. How you can live a better life using science and ideas. And that's my mission in life. Thank you for joining me in that mission, for learning these ideas to give yourself a better life, but also to teach these ideas to other people. We are a movement of happiness teachers, based not just on woo-woo, really based on the best science that's available, the best that's been written and thought by academics and sensible people all over the world, which I know includes you. I'm grateful to you for joining me on this journey. Before we get started, I would like to ask you for one favor. Please subscribe to this YouTube channel, and to the show such that you can have these episodes delivered to you directly. Most of the people who actually see the show aren't subscribed, strangely. And so that's an efficient way to do it. It also helps us in the algorithm so that we can reach more people. The algorithm will say who's like the person who just subscribed and it will show up in their algorithm so that they can benefit from this information as well. So thank you very much for that. One more thing. If you have anything to tell us to improve the show, to suggest topics, we're more than a year in at this point, and we need ideas. We want ideas. We want to know what's most on your mind. Please let us know. Uh, you can write to the, to the, the show itself, office [email protected]. 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And last but not least, if you're interested in, in, in meeting other people in person, retreats on these particular subjects, we have a series of retreats based on all of this material, some of which I'm involved with and some of which I'm not in person, but you can find out more about that. In a very, very beautiful place in Santa Fe, New Mexico of all, of all sites. Um, what a, what better place to think about love and happiness? Go to retreats.arthurbrooks.com. Right now you're like Neo in the matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit it's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent. Because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings you're addicted. You don't like it. And I don't either, but I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get noble mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug noble mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life and you're going to like how it feels. What are we talking about today? Specifically. I want to talk about one aspect of personality, extroversion, how extroversion versus introversion affects happiness. Whether or not there are things that extroverts and introverts can learn from each other. And my answer to cut to the chase is yeah. They absolutely can. I'm going to talk to you about what gives the greatest tendency toward happiness, but why that's not a set thing. On the contrary, when we learn from each other for the great gifts that extroverts and introverts uniquely bring, when, when we can adopt, no matter who you are, adopt the other styles approach to life, your life can get a lot better. And it gives me an opportunity to talk about this fascinating field of personality science. There are many personality psychologists out there. And I want to give you a little glimpse into their work because it's something that I like to talk about an awful lot. I think you'll find it interesting. And if you find it interesting enough, I'll know because of what you leave in the comments. And I will do whole shows about each aspect of personality going forward. Really up to you now, some time ago, um, a friend of mine who also does a lot of work on, on, on, on mass education around social science. He's not an academic like me. He's actually a journalist. He's a columnist for many years, but he's very interested in how social science and behavioral science can be used in the public interest. And he sent me a link. It's a link to a survey based on academic research that rates personality traits on a numeric scale. They might think that seems so subjective. How can you rank personality traits? Well, it turns out people have been doing that for a very long time. More on that in a second. What he was most keen to know was my extraversion score or extraversion is one element of somebody's personality. He wanted to see if the test was accurate and, and because he had just taken it, he had scored at the 15th percent. So he didn't know if he was an extrovert or an extrovert, but he knew that if you were an extrovert or an extrovert, you would score at the 15th percentile for extroversion. That meant he's an introvert, obviously. So extroversion, zero to a hundred, 15th percentile means that you're at the lower end. And that means you're more introverted than extroverted because they're opposite constructs in this particular scale. He wanted to know if that was accurate by having me take it as well as the most extroverted person that he knew. So he was more interested in the fact that I was an extrovert. This is a near ideal set of quasi-experimental circumstances to get a whole bunch of data. And so sure enough, I mean, I've never actually directly participated in these things because these things were done a long time ago. But what they found was that between 40 and 80% of the variance in people's personalities is explained by genetics. Okay, so that's a lot, right? That really, that is significant, and that includes extroversion. So I want to talk about that a little bit, but I also want to make the case, and the reason I'm doing this episode is because you can change your personality, or at least you can intervene in your personality with your behavior. If it's 40 to 80% that, you know, that's the variance is explained by genetics, that means there's 20 to, you know, 20 to 60% that's not. And that means you've got significant control over the expression of your genes, the expression of your personality, even if it does have this big genetic component. So how do you do that? That's what I really want to talk about. And how can you do that? How can you do it in such a way that you actually get happier? Okay, let's back up a little bit and talk about this fascinating field of personality per se. We always use the word, you know, my personality, your personality. I don't like her personality. I think he's got a beautiful personality, whatever it happens to be. What do we mean by that? And that gets us back to the work, believe it or not, of Carl Jung. Almost everybody who's watching this knows the work of Carl Jung. You wouldn't be a follower of Office Hours if you didn't know some of the, you know, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, student colleague of Sigmund Freud, who later broke with Freud because he thought that Freud's, many of his theories were unfounded, or at least they didn't go far enough in directions that he wanted to go. Carl Jung was one of the first people to study the whole concept of the unique personality that people have. And this is the early part of the 20th century. So it's not that old. It's only a little over a hundred years ago that people really started talking about the unique personality. And by the way, we even use that, the concept of personality when we talk about our dogs or horses or, you know, my cat has a funny personality. That's a very anthropomorphic idea. And yet it's real. You can tell the difference between two dogs' personalities. And there are people who do sort of animal psychology who try to measure that. Not nearly as much as people. We're going to talk about people here, not about dogs. I love dogs. They're the best people, but you get my point. But Jung, the way he waded into this concept was really that, that first aspect of personality, which is extroversion versus introversion. He was the one who first really talked about introverts and extroverts as this binary kind of switch that people have. He's the author of that very concept. And those words, they were first popularized by him in 1921, as a matter of fact. And, you know, he talked about it in a way that, you know, introverts, they seek to establish autonomy and independence. Extroverts. They're not so keen on those things. They're not trying to establish autonomy and independence. What they're trying to do is to establish community and reach out all the time. And their sources of happiness are fundamentally different. Extroverts seek to seek union with others. And there's a whole lot written about that. But let me expand the concept of personality a little bit to how it developed over the next few decades. Personality, as we came to understand it a little bit later, largely through the work of the German psychologist Hans Eysenck, expanded from introversion and extroversion to a five-factor model. We, as human beings, and I've talked about it very briefly on the show before, so you might remember me referring to these ideas in the past, that the human personality has five elements to it that we can measure. And there's a whole series of statistical methods to actually do this. This wasn't just made up by some self-improvement author. This is largely a method that comes from a lot of people. It comes from something called factor analysis or principal components analysis, a statistical technique in which you take a huge battery of questions and you let the data decide what the individual elements that are popping out of the answers to the questions actually are. You can Google it if you want, factor analysis, and you can learn more or less how it works. But it's a very robust technique for figuring out what the elements of something actually are statistically. What they found is that the human personality has five dimensions to it. Now, this can be. Easily remembered using the acronym OCEAN, O-C-E-A-N, because each one of the elements starts with one of those letters. Obviously, that's how acronyms work. The O is openness to experience. This is a very distinct personality characteristic. Some people, it's like, don't give me anything new. They want to go to the beach every year on vacation. They want to watch the same shows on television. When they go to their favorite restaurant, they always order the same dish. You know, they like to go to bed at the same time every night. They like to see their friends. They're not super open. They're not super open to these new kinds of experiences. These are the people, you go to them and you say, what do you say? Let's try skydiving. They're like, what are you, crazy? Why would I even want to do that? Like, I've got my routines. I've got the things that I actually like. Other people are just, they're junkies for new experiences. They love the newness. They have what many psychologists would call neophilia, the love of new things. They like, you know, new kinds of art and feeling new ways. Now, neophilics, it's great. Right? I mean, it's great. It's the spice of life, but also it has a downside. Neophilics, they tend to experiment with drugs and alcohol. They tend to have more sexual partners. You get the point and which can lead to all sorts of trouble in their lives. So, you know, everything has got a good side to bad side is what it comes down to. But that's number one is openness to experience as a personality dimension. That's the O. C is conscientiousness. Conscientious people live up to their word. If they, their word is their bond, as they say these days. And, and conscientious people, well, they tend to be older. One of the things about personality that's most interesting is how it changes. And people get more conscientious as they age. One of the reasons for this is that they realize that being not conscientious, being unreliable, for example, that that actually is bad for them. People don't like hanging out with non-conscientious people, people who don't show up when they say they're going to show up, people who don't do what they say they're going to do, and so they actually become more conscientious as a matter of living a better life, but also because they want to be better people. Now, some people are just naturally more conscientious than others. It's about 50% explained genetically. And, and, and, you know, people like that, even little kids who are just always can count on them. They're just conscientious people. Three are the third one. The E is extroversion. That's the one that we've been talking about. And, and I introversion doesn't get its own letter because it's the opposite of extroversion in this particular construct and the way that we're talking about it. Extroversion is this idea of wanting to be in union with others, being highly social. Extroversion has, has two sub-elements to it, two sub-particles. You could say they're gregariousness and assertiveness. To be extroverted means you're gregarious. You're super outgoing. You want to be with people, but you're also say what you think. That's the difference between gregariousness and assertiveness. And here's the interesting thing. As people get older, one of them actually declines and the other increases. So gregariousness tends to fall as people get into their fifties and sixties and especially seventies. They become less likely to want to go to that party and stay out late. You know, they're more likely to say, what time is it over? I don't think I'm going, but they tend to become more assertive. You know, I'll tell you, I'm 62 years old. And when I was 32, I, you know, they gave me French fries instead of mashed potatoes, um, accidentally in the restaurant. I'd be like, okay. And now I'm like, life is short. I asked for mashed potatoes. I'm not going to be a jerk about it because I'm trying to, you know, get the next element of personality I'll tell you about. As I get older, but it's, I am more assertive than I certainly was in the past. So gregariousness as an aspect of extroversion tends to go down as you get older and assertiveness tends to go up. That's E. A is agreeableness. That's the one that I really want to, I want to have higher. That's one of the reasons that when I send my, my French fries back, I'm not being a jerk about it because I want to be agreeable in no small part, because I've learned through bitter experience in my life that when I'm disagreeable, I don't get what I want. I try to be more agreeable with my family. I try to be more agreeable with my friends and certainly more agreeable with service personnel in my life. Also, I want to be a good person because through conscientiousness, I want to be more agreeable, but I've also figured out that that's an effective strategy for leading a better life. Agreeableness does tend to rise as you age and agreeableness is just what it sounds like. It's somebody, you don't agree on everything, but you're, you're not disagreeable when you disagree is what it comes down to. A lot in there, but you get my point. That's A. Last but not least is N and N is a tricky one because that's neuroticism. That's a very Freudian term to be neurotic. Largely what it means today is to suffer from mood disorders, um, either subclinically or clinically the mood disorders we'd largely talk about are generalized anxiety and, and, and, and, and depression, you know, sort of melancholy is what, uh, Sigmund Freud would have talked about it, how you would have talked about it. And, and of course these are big, these are a big deal today, um, since 2008 or so clinical depression, particularly among people under 35 has tripled. Generalized anxiety has doubled. I mean, these are the scourge of our times. And if you've been listening to my show, you know exactly how I talk about this. The truth is that we use our brains wrong, largely with the interface of technology into our lives. I'm very, very glad that you're watching or you're listening to this podcast right now, but you need plenty of time in your life when you're not watching this or listening to podcasts and certainly not letting the algorithms just feed you stuff all the time, especially shorts. What that does is it makes you, your brain work in such a way that you You don't even assess or think about questions of meaning in your life. And that tends to make you more depressed, anxious, and lonely. So neuroticism, which has always existed, there have always been people who are anxious and depressed, is something that is dramatically deleterious for human happiness and well-being, life satisfaction, obviously. But they're increasing. People are becoming more neurotic. And there's a ton of interesting studies on this that show that people under 35 have become significantly higher on the neuroticism, on the N-dimension of the big five-factor personality traits than they've been in the past. This especially exploded not just after 2008, but during COVID, which compounded all the problems through loneliness and isolation. For everybody, by the way, for people my age, but also if you're in your 20s, for people your age, the problem is that for people in their 20s, it didn't snap back. Whereas for people my age, it did. Neuroticism came back to its baseline largely, and it didn't for people who are younger. So this is a significant area of concern, something that I'm. I'm looking at a lot, as are a lot of behavioral scientists, because we want to make this better. Okay. So those are the personality dimensions. I'll put a link to the Jung 1921 research in there in case you're looking at it. And once again, the article that I referred to before by Lewis Goldberg, the classic 1992 article on the personality dimensions, that's already in the show notes, so you can read more about that. Now, the person who really popularized these in the 1960s was that German psychologist, Hans Eysenck, that I talked about. And Hans Eysenck was, as he developed this five-factor model, he strongly believed that there was kind of a neuroscientific dimension. There's a neurobiological reason for all of this stuff, which kind of makes sense given the fact that we found that, you know, that these aspects are explained at about, you know, the 40 to 80% level by genetics. The difference between people is explained a lot by genetics. So you'd think that there'd be a structural explanation that we'd be able to find in the brain. Eysenck believed very strongly that, you know, that the that, for example, in the case of extroversion, which we're focusing on here, it came from cortical arousal. That is the brain's level of alertness. Some people just genetically have, you know, a higher level of alertness. And furthermore, he found that it was harder for some people to maintain cortical arousal, sufficient to be successful than others. That some people, they were just not naturally that alert. And here's the interesting part. He believed that extroverts tended to be low in cortical arousal. Tended to be less alert. That's the opposite of what I presume you thought I was going to say, but it's going to make sense in a second. He thought that maintaining a level of sufficient, sufficiently high level of alertness to function properly was more difficult for extroverts than introverts. So extroverts have to seek the stimulation from others. That introverts have an endogenous alertness. So they don't need to be talking to other people all the time and interacting with people so much. Whereas extroverts tend to be less alert. And so, extroverts tend to be less alert. And so, extroverts are not as alert as much. That cortical arousal is actually inhibiting their performances. So they actually need to get more alertness. And the way that they do that is by interacting more with others. That was Isink's observation based on data. And it has some empirical backing, as a matter of fact. Furthermore, he believed that extroverts tend to be more reward-focused, especially when it comes to social stimulation. Whereas introverts tend to rely more on internal processing and reflection. Those are two ideas that are obviously pretty similar. I'll put Isink's 1960s research in here on intelligence assessment, etc. And also just how more recent work has evaluated the legitimacy of this research. Mitchell and Kumari, 2016, about Hans Isink's interface between the brain and personality, modern evidence from cognitive neuroscience. That's in Personality Individual Differences, which is a great journal, highly reputable. I'll put in a couple of more references on that if you're interested in that. I know some of you really are. Okay. So what about happiness? Okay. So that explains why some people, potentially explains why some people are just more extroverted than others. But what about the fact that we find in the research that extroverts tend to have a happiness edge? Why do they tend to be a little bit happier? This kind of blends together a bunch of psychological theories, but here's the typical explanation for why that is the case. Humans, we know, are inherently social animals. You've heard me go on and on about the fact that we are a hierarchical, in-based, pack, tropical species. Homo sapiens are. And our brains are suited to live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals that have to be really together to survive, to pass on our genes and to survive. We have to know our kin and be close to our kin and be highly social with our kin. So we're like wolves in this way. We're like many, many other pack animals. We have to be together. So that being the case, that we are inherently social animals and that contact actually gives us a sense of belonging. And that's why we have to be really together. That's the satisfaction. Extroverts who seek out contact to get this cortical stimulation, they're going to be happier as a result of doing this thing. We're highly rewarded for being social. We get a happiness reward for being social. Okay. Part one, part two, extroverts look for the stimulus because their brain needs it. Ergo, when they try to go get that thing that their brain needs, they get happier naturally. That's the whole idea that they're social. Being social makes you happy. Extroverts love people. And so by doing what they naturally want to do, they become happier than introverts. If you're like me, you got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's Element. L-M-N-T. Probably knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. So if you're on a diet, you're going to want to give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed and made for athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me, anyone who sweats. So how do I use it? I use it in the morning, 4.45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase. At Drink Element, that's drink, just like it sounds, L-M-N-T dot com slash Arthur. Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it. The fact that introverts prefer solitude and struggle with sociability doesn't mean that avoiding contact makes them happier. And this is an interesting thing. So you might say, okay, so extroverts, they're happier because they're in contact with others. So therefore, introverts must be happier when they're not in contact with others. This is the case. And this is the argument that psychologists have always made, that being an introvert and avoiding people is an example of meeting a need, but that that need not bringing you happiness. We do this all the time. We do all kinds of things here that meet a need in our life or a perceived need in our life that actually make us less happy. Because once again, Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. We have to be responsible for that, not just following our animal impulses. All right. Now, there are other reasons, more contemporary reasons, than all of this. I mean, I realize that some of that was relatively esoteric, but there are other more common sense reasons why you would find in the literature that natural extroverts tend to be a little bit happier than natural introverts. To begin with, extroversion in American society in particular is hugely rewarded, much, much less so in other societies, by the way. In East Asia, for example, American style extroversion is considered to be really weird. And it makes people extremely uncomfortable, as a matter of fact. I mean, if you go out to dinner with a bunch of your friends in East Asia and you start talking about personal issues in your life, it's not going to be rewarded. That's more of an American thing. It's also more of a Latin American thing. I spend a lot of time, as some of you know, in Spain because my wife is Spanish. And so we've spent, we've lived off and on in Barcelona for the past 35 years. And when we're there, I mean, it's like, it's extroversion. It's like 10, whereas it's less than that in the United States. Relatively speaking, it's a far more extroverted place. And the result is that you can have conversations that you never would. I mean, I recounted in one of my columns some time ago about a wonderful dinner that my wife and I had with complete strangers in Madrid last year. And within 15 minutes, the hostess at this dinner of eight couples, we didn't know him. She said, you know, I meant to ask all of you, what's the closest you all came to getting a divorce? And it's like, strangers. Gulp. I mean, that would make people uncomfortable in the United States. It would make people, you know, run screaming from the room in Japan, probably. But in Spain, it's like, ah, interesting conversation. Go deeper, go home, man. And that's based on this naturally highly extroverted culture. In the United States, it's rewarded not just socially, it's rewarded economically. Extroverts make a lot more money. There's an interesting study that shows that extroverts make about $12,000 more per year than introverts, which at the general level is like, that's no joke when the family of four in the United States makes about $75,000 a year. That's very significant. That's almost a 20% differential in what the average family is going to make. As a matter of fact, they also, extroverts, they tend to attain other advantages in the workplace, such as promotions to leadership positions and high performance evaluations. And there's a ton of studies on that. There's one from the Journal of Applied Psychology, I'll put in the notes, called Extroversion Advantages at Work, a Quantitative Review and Synthesis of the Meta-Analytic Evidence. Yeah, you got to see this because, you know, it turns out that we really, really rewarded. Now, I've seen it over the course of my career, not in my case, but, you know, I've taught in business schools for a long time. I go back teaching at business schools for 30 years and business schools, they love extroverts. I mean, I've taught classes where the grading criteria involved class participation up to 50% of the grade. I've seen classes that are 70% of the grade are class participation. And that's just like a root canal for introverts, putting your hand up and just going blah, blah, blah, blah, for the sake of the blah, blah, blah, because you want to get your grade up. Now, when I taught my classes, I tried very, despite my extroversion, because I'd be the guy like this all the time. Again, not a flex. But I didn't want to reward that in the same way because, you know, being a behavioral scientist, I got the data. I don't want to unduly penalize people who just happen to be natural introverts. So I would give them all different ways to participate. And I would make sure with my calling patterns for people who are not having their hands up that I would give them a particular opportunity at the beginning of class to get their comments in if they're getting counted. But most professors don't do that. At business schools, it's like, probably got their hand up, gets called on, they get higher grades. This is an example of the advantages that we're actually talking about. That, quite frankly, can be extremely unfair, but it's the law of the jungle. I mean, particularly when you're making your way into American culture. Very interesting book that talks about how unfair that is and how inefficient that is, is a very famous book maybe some of you already know about. The wonderful author Susan Cain has the book Quiet. The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. I know she's not big on extroverts like me. I get it. But it's a wonderful book and it's really worth reading because she talks about examples of many wonderful things that have been created by introverts and, you know, theory of gravity. Isaac Newton was an introvert. Google was developed by introverts. And she argues that admiring and rewarding extroversion isn't just unfair, but it actually hinders progress. And so we should do something about that. It's actually, that book has been influential among readers and it's been influential with me too. I mean, one of the reasons that I watch my call patterns to not marginalize the introverts in my class is precisely because of Susan Cain's work and how important it is. So if you ever feel disillusioned in the United States or any other place about our habit of elevating egotistical and charismatic leaders, you'll probably admit that Susan Cain has a point. And that it's not just unfair, but it's kind of unfair. And so I'm unwise for us to be marginalizing introverts or not paying attention to them. Okay, let's get to the really applied part of how this all comes about. I hope you found this interesting, but I want you to be able to use this as well, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. How can introverts increase their happiness? They're not going to change fundamentally their personalities. Now, some introverts are so skilled as thespians, like as actors, that they can put on extroversion all day long, but not when they come home. And one of the things that I think is really important is that I talk about an awful lot is happiness and relationships and how one of the big barriers to happiness and relationships is for people who can't feel like they can be themselves with their partners. You have to have your personality. Now, again, work on your neuroticism. Don't dump the garbage on your partner when you come home every day with your sadness and anxiety. I mean, work to actually manage that, especially with the people that you love the most, but you have to have a baseline of who you are. Otherwise, you'll be uncomfortable and you'll never really be happy Be happier people. And what can they learn from extroverts? And then what can extroverts learn from introverts? Let's start with what introverts can learn from extroverts. Number one, introverts can get a lot happier, not just by, you know, going and talking to strangers, although there is literature on that. Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, a psychologist, said that introverts can learn from extroverts. And introverts can learn incredible work, has talked about the fact that when people talk to strangers, everybody gets happier. Now, that's brutal for introverts. For extroverts, they're like, yeah, no kidding. I've always done that. You sit down in a plane next to an extrovert and you're like, so where are you from? And which might actually drive you crazy. What introverts can do, however, that isn't hard is to focus more on the future, like extroverts do. Now, this is a tricky topic. Human beings have an incredible ability to travel time. There's the ability to travel time. There's three time zones inside your brain. They're called prospection, mindfulness, and retrospection. Retrospection, the last one, is thinking about the past. Mindfulness is thinking about right now. And prospection is thinking about the future. You're probably, anybody who's a fan of this show, knows about mindfulness meditation techniques. And what that is, is this observation that most homo sapiens, most of us, we don't spend enough time in the mindful present. And we kind of miss it. And there are all kinds of reasons that we should try to be more mindful. Philosophers and theologians have pointed out forever that you can only love in the present. You can't love in the future, love in the past. Loving happens right now. And if you want evidence of that, think about when you're with your beloved and when you're having the most intense experience of love. It's when you're sitting together locked in. It's not when you're sitting together thinking about tomorrow at work. That's not when you're expressing or receiving love. It's when you're together and looking into each other's eyes. It's when you're looking into each other's eyes. It's when you're looking into each other's eyes and being present right now. And so presentism, mindfulness is a very, very important skill. Now that said, one of the things that we also know as an element of happiness is prospection to the extent that you always have something to look forward to. It gives you a sense of anticipation. Why? Because purpose, which is an element of meaning in our lives, requires goals and direction and progress. Goals, direction, and progress. You want to be a happier person, you need goals, you need a direction in life. And you need to make progress toward those goals, following that direction. That's a really important part of meaning. And meaning is an incredibly unreplaceable element of happiness. That's one of the things that I write the most about, as a matter of fact. And so the result of it is that you need to have something that you can look forward to. You have to have something that is this goal. Don't be insane about it. Don't be super attached to it. But you have to have something that gives you a sense of anticipation of reward. Extroverts always do that. Extroverts, however, are great about thinking about future rewards, which is one of the sources of their happiness. There's a 2001 study, that's a 25-year-old study now, believe it or not, sorry to depress you, from Oxford University, that broke a sample of survey respondents into four groups. Here are the four groups. Happy extroverts, unhappy extroverts, smaller group, happy introverts, and unhappy introverts. Okay, now what are they really, really interested in? They're interested in what drove the happy introvert. Happy introverts into higher well-being. Because, you know, these are the out groups. I would also want to know why the extroverts were so unhappy in that group. But happy introverts, what were they doing differently than the unhappy introverts? That's what the scholars were really into. And they found that they were doing something that extroverts do naturally, which is that a sense of optimism, a sense of life purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of goals, a sense of progress. That article came out in Personality and Individual Differences, same journal I talked about. a minute ago. It's called Happiness, Introversion, Extroversion, and Happy Introverts in the show notes, of course. Now, extroverts do this naturally. They think about the future and they dream about the future naturally. They love to talk to people about their future. They talk about their dreams. They talk about life's purpose. They talk about it all the time. This is what I talk about with my kids a lot, not mine, theirs, because they got a much bigger future than I do. We tend to act according to the commitments that we've articulated to others. And the result of it is that when extroverts do this naturally, they dream about the future. When they express their thoughts and hopes and dreams to others over the course of their extroversion and sociability, their gregariousness, that they tend to live according to these dreams. They tend to follow these goals. They tend to take that trajectory. And that's one of the secrets to their great happiness. What do happy introverts do? Here's the answer from that research. Happy introverts have figured out a way to envision the future without all of the uncomfortable personal sharing with other people. In other words, they envision the future. They think about the future such that they can, I guess in the new age world, you'd say manifest that. I've written a lot about manifesting. It doesn't come from turning the gears in the universe that I'm aware of. What it does is it turns the gears in your head. It makes you behave a little bit differently subconsciously. So when introverts, not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah about their future to everybody, but when they think, think, think, think about their future, when they're more future without marginalizing the mindful present, when they do that, they tend to manifest that better future. And that's what makes them happier. There's another thing that introverts naturally do, which gets me to my second point on how extroverts can actually learn from introverts. There's one big skill that introverts have that extroverts don't, which is deep, deep, deep friendship with just a few people. Now we have limited time and cognitive bandwidth and everything and work and studying and everything. And also in friendship. And so you can spread out the amount of friendship that you can cognitively manage among a few people or among a lot of people. And no, I see this a lot with my students. And I even see this with my kids. Two of my kids are super extroverted, like me and my wife. We're a family of dogs, but we have one daughter, our youngest child, and she's not a dog. She's a cat. She's one cat living with four dogs. And she's talked, because she's an introvert and we're all extroverts. and she's like it's just it's you know it's almost as if here's her joke it's almost as if we're not related right because it turns out we're not genetically related she's adopted she i mean she's so one of us and and in so many ways she understands me at such an unbelievably deep level but the result is that we've come to appreciate her catness and she's come to appreciate our dogginess in a lot of ways she also you know calls us out when we're being you know too loud or obnoxious to be sure keep it down in there says my youngest daughter but what she has an advantage of over the rest of us is that she's got usually a couple of really really really deep close friendships she's good at deep friendship in a way that you know it's harder for me it's easier for me to be like fresh meat you know it's easier for me to like i want to be friends with everybody and she doesn't which means that she partitions her friendship with me and she's like i want to be friends with everybody and she doesn't time and effort and cognitive energy toward just a few people and those are deep intimate relationships that bring a huge amount of satisfaction so so who do they talk about their futures with if not everybody who will listen the answer is their few actual friends they forge close friendships with people with whom they have nothing to gain as an intense source of their satisfaction okay now that turns out to be hard for extroverts because they want new new new new they're extroverts and they want to be friends with people who are not extroverts also tend to be highly open and experience in in appetite for experience they tend to be neophilic but when they actually will deepen their friendships and focus on fewer as opposed to more extroverts can get a lot happier as well so how do you do that if you're an extrovert and don't know how to begin you should just watch a happy introvert do it you know i learned to do that by actually watching my wife and i'm a much better friend and here's a side note before i get to a couple of things a couple of pieces of homework that i want to give you beyond the specifics of introversion and extroversion there's one important lesson in all this watching and learning from people very different from you is a great way to be happier so what have i just told you the introverts can get happier by watching extroverts and behaving like them and extroverts can get even happier by looking at introverts and behaving like them but that's just generally true across personality and across different aspects of human life happiness actually will come to you when you embrace human diversity of all types and appreciate that diversity from culture to character even to politics as a matter of fact one of the things is that's so threatening to so many people in modern life today is like if you disagree with me i'm not going to date you i'm not going to hang out with you if you voted for that guy whoever that guy is i'm not going to specify it doesn't really matter it means that you're morally reprobate and what you find is when people relax that and say i'm really really interested in people who have the what i consider to be extremely weird views that they get much happier just by observing even if you don't take on these characteristics politically i know you're not gonna as somebody else when you just observe it with an attitude of interest in the other person you get much happier the broad point is that observing other people non-judgmentally is one of the greatest happiness lessons that we can actually get for the happiest world we're going to have cats and dogs but cats need to watch the dogs and dogs need to watch the cats and we can learn from each other okay here's my challenge for the week ahead here's my happiness homework for you number one if you're an introvert okay for the introverts who are watching the show take time this week to call an old friend with whom you'd like to re-establish some contact all right make a new friend again i'm not going to ask you to call 50 friends one friend that you want to establish contact with this will harness your natural one-on-one powers and introvert and what i want you to do when you're talking to that friend is to say i want to learn you know what's going on in your life and i want to tell you what's going on in mind and then talk about these hopes and dreams establish a new relationship in other words this is a small act of extroversion within the context of your natural strengths this is going to make you happier that's your homework here's your homework if you're an extrovert i want you to focus on one friend in your life this week i know you got a lot then you got a lot a big circle so i want you to focus on your natural strengths and i want you to focus on what's going on in your natural strengths and i want you to focus on your natural strengths and i want you to focus on what's going on in your natural strengths and i want you to focus on what's going on in your natural strengths put your phone away i mean literally wait not even down on the table so that you're completely um undistracted from that particular person and you're uninterrupted by this as really an exciting adventure okay and and and do this bilateral this dyadic experience and what you're going to find is that that's going to give you an enormous amount of sort of depth and satisfaction that you don't get from the ordinary experiences of your life this is you practicing the power of introversion by focusing intently on one person at a time so that's your homework if you're an extrovert okay try that write in the show notes tell me how it goes if you like more on this on personality in particular let me know i would love to talk about agreeableness or conscientiousness or openness to experience i'll talk more about neuroticism i'll talk about all of it i think personality is absolutely fascinating so if you do too let me know and i'll be i'll do more shows episodes like this let's do some questions before we finish sofia asks she writes into the email address does having a budget increase happiness while on vacation i don't assume she means a budget of time i assume she means a budget of money literally does having a budget or even being financially aware in general increase happiness okay so there's been no studies that i'm aware of that talk about how constraining your budget on vacation and how it affects your happiness my guess is that when you don't have enough money on vacation you're not going to have enough money on vacation you're not going to have it's not great and that's probably pretty straightforward and maybe even trivial but there are a couple of questions here that are really worth addressing one of the things that we know is when people overspend on vacation that's really bad and one of the reasons is that getting behind the eight ball financially is horrible for your happiness and it's especially bad the worst possible thing that you can do is to borrow money to go on vacation that my friends is uh is is is regressed with respect to happiness now some of you will remember and episodes i've done in the past about how to use money to get happier buying stuff will not make you happier buying experiences with your family and friends that's the vacation will bring you happiness buying time and spending it with your family or friends which you can be doing on vacation as well will bring happiness giving your money away will bring happiness and saving your money getting ahead financially will bring you happiness because it gives you the sense of purpose and progress and goals and direction and some of the stuff i've talked about here today as a matter of fact but on the other hand i'm not going to talk about how to use money to get happier and going backwards with respect to saving aka borrowing especially for consumption i've got the data on this this is not just conjecture the data are very clear borrowing for consumption including for vacation will give you negative happiness aka unhappiness don't do that okay so if you're living within a budget fine if that's the way it has to be okay don't break it because if you go into debt and you're running up your credit cards on vacation you will have gone into the red numbers not just financially but with respect to your happiness as well second question here is from anonymous at office hours at arthurburgs.com i struggle with my relationship in my relationships with failure how can i keep trying despite feeling discouraged by it i hear this a lot from people in their 20s and i know people who are you know 25 years old who feel like they're a disaster with respect to relationships because nothing's ever worked out well you're 25 okay easy for me to say at 62 but i say that with appropriate humility if you've had a few relationships not work out i get it you're gonna start to wonder is it ever gonna happen for me let me give you one statistic the average person before they find their soulmate before they find the person that they're gonna marry they have five heartbreaks that's the average right your results may vary you know one of my kids fell in love for the first time and got engaged and got married has an incredibly happy marriage has kids good your number comes up there are five years and they're billionaires you know my son's a billionaire love and happiness on his first try it's great i mean it's actually because his wife is so awesome but you know other people typically they don't have that experience some people you know the average is five meaning that there are people in the other tail where it's like 10 but that doesn't mean that it that they're a failure on the contrary you know the same thing is true with startup businesses this is a startup life your romance is the startup of your life and it requires reps and it requires experience and failure is generative in this particular way the average startup entrepreneur in business has 3.8 failures almost four failures has four things that didn't work out before something that actually does and they learn from each one of those so the cycle is basically this try fail suffer recover try fail suffer recover i get it you will heal i'm gonna done a lot of work on heartbreak i know the timing and you know how i actually how grief works i even know the part of the brain the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that is actually highly active when you're in the middle of a breakup i get it brutal supposed to be brutal but but but if you're having failure in your relationships it means you're out there and it means you're actually trying and that's good it's not evidence of of you're doing something wrong it's probably evidence that you're doing something right now you can always get better at it you can always be better at relationships but that's the point of actually going through the cycle is getting better and learning from what went wrong the last time and making sure you don't you don't choose the same wrong person over and over and over again. So anonymous, struggle with relationships being a failure you say yeah you and a lot of other people stay in it the fact that you're writing this and continuing to struggle with that is evidence that i strongly believe and i predict that permanent love is coming your way well we're done my friends let me know your thoughts by writing to me at the at the on the website at office hours at arthurbrooks.com leave comments criticisms any place you're watching or listening to this we read them all and we love them like and subscribe please hit the subscribe and like buttons on spotify youtube apple follow me on instagram on the social media platforms i know social media has so many things we don't like about it but it can be good for learning and that's exactly what i'm trying to do with mine instagram linkedin x tiktok wherever your thing is i'm probably there if you're interested in these topics and many more please get my latest book the meaning of your life um it's still pretty new came out the end of march and it's still it's still selling a lot of copies um it's also now in i think 20 languages we get a couple new languages every month and uh i would love to hear what you've got to say about that as well i hope you have a wonderful week my friends i'm looking forward to seeing you next week thank you for tuning in go love other people in your own way whether you're an extrovert or an introvert that's what makes the world a better place see you soon you your heart can tell you a lot about your health apple watch series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable so your vitals app now with heart rate variability can tell you when something is off and your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push hear the story in every heartbeat with apple watch series 12 the features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use iphone 11 or later required based on apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy august 2026 visit apple.com apple watch series 12 Thank you.